Hawaii went radioactive yesterday with spiking radiation readings as shown in both of the two charts below from BlackCatSystems showing huge spikes in radiation levels. With reports of the Pacific Ocean dying and radiation levels rising throughout...

"The surface of the Earth is broken up into large plates. It’s easy to confuse these plates with the Earth’s crust – the thin outermost layer of the Earth. But there is more to the structure of the Earth than this simple image of a ‘cracked egg-shell’.

The Earth’s layers can be defined in two different ways – based on the chemical composition or the mechanical properties of the rock. To understand what plates are, it is important to understand both of ..."

Mother Nature NetworkNASA Wants You to Find Hubble's Next Iconic ImageWired NewsBy Adam Mann The European Space Agency wants you to help search for spectacular but overlooked images from the Hubble space telescope.

This article is about NASAs Hubble Space Telescope. The article explains how the European Space Agency wants the public to look through the Hubble photographs. There are millions of these photos. These photos can be accessed through a public database. I believe this is a great way to try and find new things in the universe. This story took place on March 27, 2012. It has to do with all of the past events of the Hubble Mission. This is event and these pictures are occurring throughout our Solar System. This story is important because it is the farthest reaching NASA mission we have. I predict that there will be many new discoveries throughout the lifetime of Hubble.

What do you think will be found in these pictures taken from the Hubble Space Telescope?

Examination of the Martian atmosphere by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover confirms that some meteorites that have dropped to Earth really are from the Red Planet.

A key new measurement of the inert gas argon in Mars’ atmosphere by Curiosity’s laboratory provides the most definitive evidence yet of the origin of Mars meteorites while at the same time providing a way to rule out Martian origin of other meteorites.

The new measurement is a high-precision count of two forms of argon — argon-36 and argon-38 — accomplished by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument inside the rover. These lighter and heavier forms, or isotopes, of argon exist naturally throughout the solar system. On Mars the ratio of light to heavy argon is skewed because much of that planet’s original atmosphere was lost to space. The lighter form of argon was taken away more readily because it rises to the top of the atmosphere more easily and requires less energy to escape. That left the Martian atmosphere relatively enriched in the heavier isotope, argon-38.

Years of past analyses by Earth-bound scientists of gas bubbles trapped inside Martian meteorites had already narrowed the Martian argon ratio to between 3.6 and 4.5 (that is 3.6 to 4.5 atoms of argon-36 to every one of argon-38). Measurements by NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s put the Martian atmospheric ratio in the range of four to seven. The new SAM direct measurement on Mars now pins down the correct argon ratio at 4.2.

“We really nailed it,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, lead author of an Oct. 16 paper reporting the finding in Geophysical Research Letters. “This direct reading from Mars settles the case with all Martian meteorites.”

One reason scientists have been so interested in the argon ratio in Martian meteorites is that it was — before Curiosity — the best measure of how much atmosphere Mars has lost since the planet’s wetter, warmer days billions of years ago. Figuring out the planet’s atmospheric loss would enable scientists to better understand how Mars transformed from a once water-rich planet, more like our own, into today’s drier, colder and less-hospitable world.

QUEBEC CITY, Oct. 21, 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has reached an important milestone with its Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) mission on-board of the Canadian Space Agency's (CSA) SCISAT satellite. Successfully launched on August 12, 2003 by NASA, the satellite is far out-performing its original mandate, and provides excellent data related not only to ozone depletion, but also to climate change and air quality...

Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are -- some evidence suggested they could be room temperature.

A new study shows that while these brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, are indeed the coldest known free-floating celestial bodies, they are warmer than previously thought with temperatures about 250-350 degrees Fahrenheit.

To reach such low surface temperatures after cooling for billions of years means that these objects can only have about 5 to 20 times the mass of Jupiter. Unlike the Sun, these objects' only source of energy is from their gravitational contraction, which depends directly on their mass.

"If one of these objects was found orbiting a star, there is a good chance that it would be called a planet," says Trent Dupuy, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But because they probably formed on their own and not in a proto-planetary disk, astronomers still call these objects brown dwarfs even if they are "planetary mass."

Characterizing these cold brown dwarfs is challenging because they emit most of their light at infrared wavelengths, and they are very faint due to their small size and low temperature.

To get accurate temperatures, astronomers need to know the distances to these objects. "We wanted to find out if they were colder, fainter, and nearby or if they were warmer, brighter, and more distant," explains Dupuy. Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the team determined that the brown dwarfs in question are located at distances 20 to 50 light-years away.

To determine the distances to these objects the team measured their parallax -- the apparent change in position against background stars over time. As the Spitzer Space Telescope orbits the Sun its perspective changes and nearby objects appear to shift back and forth slightly. The same effect occurs if you hold up a finger in front of your face and close one eye and then the other. The position of your finger seems to shift when viewed against the distant background.

But even for these relatively nearby brown dwarfs, the parallax motion is small. "To be able to determine accurate distances, our measurements had to be the same precision as knowing the position of a firefly to within 1 inch from 200 miles away," explains Adam Kraus, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the other author of the study.

But the temperature at which that crystal can form had been a subject of long-running debate.

Experiments outlined in Science used X-rays to probe tiny samples of iron at extraordinary pressures to examine how the iron crystals form and melt.

Seismic waves captured after earthquakes around the globe can give a great deal of information as to the thickness and density of layers in the Earth, but they give no indication of temperature.

That has to be worked out either in computer models that simulate the Earth's insides, or in the laboratory. Measurements in the early 1990s of iron's "melting curves" - from which the core's temperature can be deduced - suggested a core temperature of about 5,000˚C.

"It was just the beginning of these kinds of measurements so they made a first estimate... to constrain the temperature inside the Earth," said Agnes Dewaele of the French research agency CEA and a co-author of the new research.

"Other people made other measurements and calculations with computers and nothing was in agreement. It was not good for our field that we didn't agree with each other."

The core temperature is crucial to a number of disciplines that study regions of our planet's interior that will never be accessed directly - guiding our understanding of everything from earthquakes to the Earth's magnetic field.

Gravitational interactions between red dwarf stars and habitable exoplanets could erase a world's axial tilt, which moderates global temperatures and creates seasons, before alien life gets a chance to develop.

A 7.3-magnitude earthquake shook Japan early Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.The quake was off the Fukushima region of Japan, 231 miles east off the island of Honshu.It was 6.2 miles deep, officials said, hit at 3:10 a.m.

An earthquake hit off the coast of Honshu, Japan, on October 25, 2013, measuring a magnitude of 7.1 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports. According to local Tokyo time, the earthquake hit at 2:10 a.m.

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